On The Table Read Magazine, “the best arts and entertainment magazine UK“, discover Steven Seidenberg’s genre-defying masterpiece Coda, where the acclaimed poet, philosopher, and artist invites readers to linger in exquisite silence, rhythmic repetition, and profound uncertainty.
Steven Seidenberg’s work asks readers to slow down. Whether through poetry, photography or philosophical reflection, his projects linger in moments of pause, uncertainty and quiet intensity. With Coda, his latest and arguably most ambitious book to date, Seidenberg invites readers into a form that privileges rhythm over resolution and attention over answers. Here, he speaks to Table Read about writing beyond genre, the influence of music and travel, and why meaning is something we gather rather than receive.
1. Your next upcoming book, Coda, has been described as a genre-defying fusion of poetic, philosophical, and even theological thought. What question—or contradiction—was the original spark behind this book?
In general, I wouldn’t say there’s a single question or impulse that sparks my work, but its form is always in some part impelled by the inadequacy of the modes of narrative that seem to limit the lives and models of selfdom that are the most generally evinced by contemporary literature, diegetic or otherwise.
This initial impulsion is still only another point of access to the broad ontological and epistemological questions that cower in every corner of consciousness, regardless of the ideological broom of character and narrative with which we think we’ve swept out every cobweb of a contraindication to that secondary pose.
2. You’ve said your writing and photography are not extensions of each other, but echoes. Can you unpack what that means for how you approach a project like Coda?
I suppose it means that I don’t think about one practice when I’m working in the other, having come to recognize the ways in which the practices speak to one another without directed consciousness towards those convergent ends. For me, this means that I can be in discourse with different characteristics of my conscious and unconscious motivations; I can use the perspective to broadly comment on my project as a whole, without attempting some explicit or illustrative collaboration between these workflows and the resultant projects.
3. Your work has been previously linked to musical minimalism—repetition, structure, subtle variation. Do you compose a book like Coda the way a composer might build a score? What’s the role of silence, rhythm, or dissonance in your writing process?
Indeed, I am also a composer/musician, though the practice is without public outlet at this moment. Still, as you suggest, there is a parallel in the prosody and music of the writing, and the process of composition is not dissimilar in certain respects, both repetition and silence are particularly important in the structuring of the work, as well as in the radically propulsive prosody that drives the voice towards the prospective reader. Note, for instance, that each fragment or ‘measure’ or stanza of the work compels its ending in a trailing off, a silence that is scripted by the ubiquity of the ellipsis as the conclusory diacritical of each such passage.
4. From The Architecture of Silence to Coda, your photographic and literary work grapples with absence, liminality, and what goes unseen or unsaid. What draws you to these margins of attention—and how do you find language or image to hold them?
I understand the epistemological positivism of the knowing subject as that of the always evidently interior, and that interiority presents a contradiction—it implicitly describes the infinity of the outside from which it has withdrawn, and thus the dialectical position of the subject and its claims to character and selfdom, history and teleology, is in ongoing dialogue with that otherwise-than-circumscribed it can never reach or know.
For those who are familiar with the literature, I would describe this movement of the logic of consciousness—of being-as a phenomenological subject—as a merging, if you will, of the Hegelian dialectic with the anti-ontology of the Kantian noumena. Which is to say that my project, in its attention to marginalia that it finds in the examination of the culturally and experientially immanent, is always a compulsion to repeat an ineluctable failure, but in that failure and its discursive correlates—its traces, that is to say—there is an ecstasis that is finally our one and only chance at…
5. You’ve studied and drawn from Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Lispector, and others. But your voice is unmistakably your own. How do you maintain that distinct voice while engaging so deeply with canonical thinkers?
I don’t think its easy for any artist, in any form, to describe voice, though it is of primary significance in finding a place for the work in the world. From a technical perspective, I would say that it’s precisely the peculiar combination of figures whose work makes up my originary diet, as it were, that helps to distinguish my perspective and style from that of other writers—but equally my general disregard for the perplexing limitations of genre, while remaining staunchly driven by the same concerns in all my work, distinguishes the voice within it.
To refer to your previous question, it’s the iterative prosody that pushes the work forward, in recursive dissolution of the promises of diegetic and philosophical prose the same, that makes the work unique, and that prosody has its origins…where? In my early poetic admirations and sources? Dickinson and Melville? Celan and Bachmann? Niedecker, Olson and Oppen? Rabelais and Sterne and Mandelstam and Cesaire? Impossible for me to tease out these markers, as much as I’m aware of the fact that my work evokes them (in my own mind, if not in the reader), that I am in an active state of knowing and unknowing recapitulation of all I’ve ingested in my reading life.
6. You live in the United States, but your artistic and philosophical practice spans several countries, languages, and forms. How has travel—and the act of seeing elsewhere—shaped your creative identity?
Being in other language and material cultures has always proved an important mechanism of both inward and outward survey, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had so many opportunities to live and work in places I don’t know particularly well. There is, of course, always a profound personal gratification in friendships and readers beyond one’s native bounds, but for me, I find that there can be a different character of resistance to the difficulties my work presents to many readers—there is really very little interest in the literary avant-garde in the US, and most readers have no exposure to the sort of canonical figures you mention, nor in the experimental character of the canon of philosophical literature that equally informs my work. Not that I don’t hope to reach such readers—and once again, I think one pathway to that access is the prism of the music of the work—but it is gratifying to find other modes access ready-to-hand, and often through readings and responses to the work that I find novel and surprising.
7. Photography often gets framed as documentation, but your images resist that—they emerge more like meditations or questions. How do you decide what to capture, and how do you know when a photograph is finished?
This is a difficult question for me to answer; I don’t mean to be resistant when I say—I don’t know. There are certain criteria for any photographic project—I have to envision a plausible series in the work, so I must construe some sort of repetition in the image making—but that hardly narrows things down. My attraction to the liminal does not privilege liminality, for example, which is to say I don’t notice some repeated phenomenon or feeling state within a certain subset of phenomena as liminal, but it is invariably what is imaged, or documented, in the work. And indeed, I want my work as a photographer to have an indexical or documentary element, but as you say, that indexicality yields to a question, a felt or even compelled mediation, and thus can both encompass and transcend the documentary.
There is nothing I find less compelling than the contemporary cliché of ‘feeling’ photography—an imaging that sets the ‘mood’ of the photographer, as it were. It’s an unwitting supplication to a broader set of market forces, inculcated in art schools and other pedagogic manipulations, that works against precisely what makes the medium interesting—how lens based art can emote both through and despite its indexical possibilities.
8. You’ve had solo photography exhibitions in Japan, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and the US, and your books are translated into multiple languages. What has surprised you most about how audiences from different cultures engage with your work?
With the visual work, the surprise is how much the response is the same across cultures—the same questions and perplexities, the same enthusiasms and repulsions to the quotidian and the unseen. I think there is a willingness to consider the fine art world as a space of the avant-garde, even amongst those who can’t tolerate such challenging work in other spaces and mediums. The right venue is required, of course; but such venues are everywhere, and those who attend them are prepared to give themselves over for a moment or two.
With written work, it’s far more difficult to draw readers to the unfamiliar, the unexpected innovation or rejection of accepted form. This is in part a time constraint, of course. It takes quite a bit longer to read 100pp of difficult writing than to spend a good amount of time at an exhibition, needless to say. But it’s also because the challenge of the visual is so commonplace now, in so many locations and through so many media, that it never really asks that much of the viewer, as much as it can nonetheless provide in terms of emotional and intellectual stimuli. The unfamiliar literary work—even in the form of the audiobook, which is something I’ve done for my last three works—presents a much more intensive challenge to the receiver, and asks more of them as an entry point.
That said, some cultures have a more intimate relationship with that challenge than others. This is both a function of the national literature and the education system, the defining distinction of what is thought acceptable artistic and literary pursuit; that every Portuguese student reads—and appreciates—Pessoa allows the brilliant challenges of his pessimism, his heteronymic dislocation of authorship, his refusal to conform to diegetic artifice, to transform the relationship to the literary avant-garde.
This is one of the ways in which I’ve found myself surprised by responses to my work in other languages—a familiarity with some of the literary luminaries the work reflects. As example, when my book Situ was released in Italian translation, I found that people recognized the influence of Nathalie Serraute—an important writer for me—which had never happened in the Anglophone world, where her work is relatively unknown. Equally, the parody of some aspects of Husserlian philosophical language and methodology was immediately apparent—a familiarity with philosophical literature, poetry, and various literary histories outside of the mainstream.
9. There’s a thread through your work that suggests meaning is not delivered, but accumulated. Do you see the reader’s role in Coda as an interpreter rather than a recipient?
To put it simply—yes! But I say this recognizing that this is the nature of all art practice, whether the receiver knows it (or likes it) or not. I do, however, make a point of telling the reader what is required of them, of asking their permission, inviting them to take the chance to lose themselves in the language and its materiality—it’s prosody and music—while digging for a different sort of meaning, a semantic and syntactical complexity they’ve never found themselves confronted with before. And it is an invitation—excited, generous, open, but equally aware that it will be declined, and thus the direct address to the reader is one that also applauds their taking leave.
10. Looking back at your impressive range of work across the last two decades—writing, art, theory—what question are you still trying to answer?
It’s the wrong way to think of it; there are no questions, no answers. There is an engagement that challenges position, emotive and psychological, and as such propels us both—my friend the reader, and myself—to new highs of confusion and complicity, new past lives of compulsion and dissemblance, new futures of digression and ecstasis just the same.
Rather than guiding the reader towards a single interpretation, Coda asks something quieter and more demanding: that we linger, listen and allow meaning to take shape over time. Seidenberg’s work resists easy categorisation, but in doing so opens up a space for genuine engagement, one in which uncertainty is not a barrier, but the very condition of discovery. For readers willing to lean into that experience, Coda is less a destination than a conversation, still unfolding.
Find more from Steven Seidenberg now:
https://www.stevenseidenberg.com
Apple Book: https://apple.co/4qjwBRm
Apple Audiobook: https://apple.co/49ekNtz
Kindle: https://amzn.to/4qochOL
Paperback: https://amzn.to/3YthIQj
Audible: https://amzn.to/4qKXn4W
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